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The platform's return on investment often eludes measurement.
Rigorously tracking and measuring performance has become intrinsic to the corporate culture of United Parcel Service (UPS). So it's not surprising that the company's talent acquisition arm leaves few stones unturned in gauging the impact of social media recruiting.
When data showed that more people were seeking jobs through online channels, officials at the Atlanta-based delivery company created new accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. The accounts provide a place to post job openings and information about what it's like to work at the company.
To maintain its worldwide workforce of 398,000, the employer tracks the return on investment (ROI) from these social media recruiting initiatives in multiple ways-but that is not necessarily the norm at most companies.
How to measure the ROI of social media initiatives remains a challenging and hotly debated issue in human resource circles. Much discussion centers on what constitutes meaningful or credible measures of social media use for recruiting, employee training, internal communication or employee engagement.
Furthermore, many HR professionals don't yet possess the software or knowhow to handle the vast amounts of unstructured, difficult-to-analyze data generated by the popular social media sites. While monitoring social media has become commonplace, employers struggle mightily with how to create actionable reports from HR's social...